One of the great goals of education is to
initiate the young into the conversation of their ancestors; to
enable them to understand the language of that conversation, in all
its subtlety, and maybe even, in their maturity, to add to it some
wisdom of their own.

The modern American educational
system no longer teaches us the political language of our
ancestors. In fact our schooling helps widen the gulf of time
between our ancestors and ourselves, because much of what we are
taught in the name of civics, political science, or American history
is really modern liberal propaganda. Sometimes this is deliberate.
Worse yet, sometimes it isnt. Our ancestral voices have
come to sound alien to us, and therefore our own moral and
political language is impoverished. Its as if the people of
England could no longer understand Shakespeare, or Germans
couldnt comprehend Mozart and Beethoven.

So to most Americans, even those
who feel oppressed by what they call big
government, it must sound strange to hear it said, in the
past tense, that tyranny came to America. After all,
we have a constitution, dont we? Weve abolished
slavery and segregation. We won two world wars and the Cold War.
We still congratulate ourselves before every ballgame on being the
Land of the Free. And we arent ruled by some fanatic with a
funny mustache who likes big parades with thousands of soldiers
goose-stepping past huge pictures of himself.

For all that, we no longer fully
have what our ancestors, who framed and ratified our Constitution,
thought of as freedom  a careful division of power that
prevents power from becoming concentrated and unlimited. The
word they usually used for concentrated power was
consolidated  a rough synonym for
fascist. And the words they used for any excessive
powers claimed or exercised by the state were
usurped and tyrannical. They would
consider the modern liberal state tyrannical in
principle; they would see in it not the opposite of the fascist,
communist, and socialist states, but their sister.

If Washington and Jefferson,
Madison, and Hamilton could come back, the first thing
theyd notice would be that the federal government now
routinely assumes thousands of powers never assigned to it
 powers never granted, never
delegated, never enumerated. These were
the words they used, and its a good idea for us to learn
their language. They would say that we no longer live under the
Constitution they wrote. And the Americans of a much later era
 the period from Cleveland to Coolidge, for example 
would say we no longer live even under the Constitution they
inherited and amended.

I call the present system
PostConstitutional America. As I sometimes
put it, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of
government.

Whats worse is that our
constitutional illiteracy cuts us off from our own national
heritage. And so our politics degenerates into increasingly bitter
and unprincipled quarrels about who is going to bear the burdens of
war and welfare.

I dont want to sound like
an oracle on this subject. As a typical victim of modern public
education and a disinformed citizen of this media-ridden country, I
took a long time  an embarrassingly long time  to
learn what Im passing on. It was like studying geometry in
old age, and discovering how simple the basic principles of space
really are. It was the old story: In order to learn, first I had to
unlearn. Most of what Id been taught and told about the
Constitution was misguided or even false. And Id never been
told some of the most elementary things, which would have saved
me a tremendous amount of confusion.

The Constitution does two things.
First, it delegates certain enumerated powers to the federal
government. Second, it separates those powers among the three
branches. Most people understand the secondary principle of the
separation of powers. But they dont grasp the primary idea
of delegated and enumerated powers.

Consider this. We have recently
had a big national debate over national health care. Advocates and
opponents argued long and loud over whether it could work, what
was fair, how to pay for it, and so forth. But almost nobody raised
the basic issue: Where does the federal government get the power
to legislate in this area? The answer is: Nowhere. The Constitution
lists 18 specific legislative powers of Congress, and not a one of
them covers national health care.

As a matter of fact, none of the
delegated powers of Congress  and delegated is
always the key word  covers Social Security, or Medicaid, or
Medicare, or federal aid to education, or most of what are now
miscalled civil rights, or countless public works
projects, or equally countless regulations of business, large and
small, or the space program, or farm subsidies, or research grants,
or subsidies to the arts and humanities, or ... well, you name it,
chances are its unconstitutional. Even the most cynical
opponents of the Constitution would be dumbfounded to learn that
the federal government now tells us where we can smoke. We are
less free, more heavily taxed, and worse governed than our
ancestors under British rule. Sometimes this government makes me
wonder: Was George III really all that bad?

Lets be clear about one
thing. Constitutional and
unconstitutional arent just simple terms of
approval and disapproval. A bad law may be perfectly
constitutional. A wise and humane law may be unconstitutional. But
what is almost certainly bad is a constant disposition to thwart or
disregard the Constitution.

Its not just a matter of
what is sometimes called the original intent of the
authors of the Constitution. What really matters is the common,
explicit, unchallenged understanding of the Constitution, on all
sides, over several generations. There was no mystery about it.

The logic of the Constitution was
so elegantly simple that a foreign observer could explain it to his
countrymen in two sentences. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that
the attributes of the federal government were carefully
defined [in the Constitution], and all that was not included among
them was declared to remain to the governments of the individual
states. Thus the government of the states remained the rule, and
that of the federal government the exception.

The Declaration of Independence,
which underlies the Constitution, holds that the rights of the
people come from God, and that the powers of the government come
from the people. Let me repeat that: According to the Declaration
of Independence, the rights of the people come from God, and the
powers of the government come from the people. Unless you grasp
this basic order of things, youll have a hard time
understanding the Constitution.

The Constitution was the
instrument by which the American people granted, or delegated,
certain specific powers to the federal government. Any power not
delegated was withheld, or reserved. As well
see later, these principles are expressed particularly in the Ninth
and Tenth Amendments, two crucial but neglected provisions of the
Constitution.

Let me say it yet again: The rights
of the people come from God. The powers of government come from
the people. The American people delegated the specific powers they
wanted the federal government to have through the Constitution.
And any additional powers they wanted to grant were supposed to
be added by amendment.

Its largely because
weve forgotten these simple principles that the country is
in so much trouble. The powers of the federal government have
multiplied madly, with only the vaguest justifications and on the
most slippery pretexts. Its chief business now is not defending our
rights but taking and redistributing our wealth. It has even created
its own economy, the tax economy, which is parasitical on the
basic and productive voluntary economy. Even much of what passes
for national defense is a kind of hidden entitlement
program, as was illustrated when President George Bush warned
some states during the 1992 campaign that Bill Clinton would
destroy jobs by closing down military bases. Well, if those bases
arent necessary for our defense, they should be closed
down.

Now of course nobody in American
politics, not even the most fanatical liberal, will admit openly that
he doesnt care what the Constitution says and isnt
going to let it interfere with his agenda. Everyone professes to
respect it  even the Supreme Court. Thats the
problem. The U.S. Constitution serves the same function as the
British royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition and
continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system
of power.

So the people who mean to do
without the Constitution have come up with a slogan to keep up
appearances: they say the Constitution is a living
document, which sounds like a compliment. They say it has
evolved in response to changing
circumstances, etc. They sneer at the idea that such a
mystic document could still have the same meanings it had two
centuries ago, or even, I guess, sixty years ago, just before the
evolutionary process started accelerating with fantastic velocity.
These people, who tend with suspicious consistency to be liberals,
have discovered that the Constitution, whatever it may have meant
in the past, now means  again, with suspicious consistency
 whatever suits their present convenience.

Do liberals want big federal
entitlement programs? Lo, the Interstate Commerce Clause turns
out to mean that the big federal programs are constitutional! Do
liberals oppose capital punishment? Lo, the ban on cruel and
unusual punishment turns out to mean that capital
punishment is unconstitutional! Do liberals want abortion on
demand? Lo, the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, plus their
emanations and penumbras, turn out to mean that abortion is
nothing less than a womans constitutional right!

Can all this be blind evolution? If
liberals were more religious, they might suspect the hand of
Providence behind it! This marvelous living
document never seems to impede the liberal agenda in any
way. On the contrary: it always seems to demand, by a wonderful
coincidence, just what liberals are prescribing on other
grounds.

Take abortion. Set aside your own
views and feelings about it. Is it really possible that, as the
Supreme Court in effect said, all the abortion laws of all 50 states
 no matter how restrictive, no matter how permissive
 had always been unconstitutional? Not only that, but no
previous Court, no justice on any Court in all our history 
not Marshall, not Story, not Taney, not Holmes, not Hughes, not
Frankfurter, not even Warren  had ever been recorded as
doubting the constitutionality of those laws. Everyone had always
taken it for granted that the states had every right to enact
them.

Are we supposed to believe, in all
seriousness, that the Courts ruling in Roe v.
Wade was a response to the text of the Constitution,
the discernment of a meaning that had eluded all its predecessors,
rather than an enactment of the current liberal agenda? Come
now.

And notice that the parts of this
living document dont develop equally or
consistently. The Court has expanded the meaning of some of
liberalisms pet rights, such as freedom of speech, to absurd
lengths; but it has neglected or even contracted other rights, such
as property rights, which liberalism is hostile to.

In order to appreciate what has
happened, you have to stand back from all the details and look at
the outline. What follows is a thumbnail history of the
Constitution.

In the beginning the states were
independent and sovereign. That is why they were called
states: a state was not yet thought of as a mere
subdivision of a larger unit, as is the case now. The universal
understanding was that in ratifying the Constitution, the 13 states
yielded a very little of their sovereignty, but kept most of it.

Those who were reluctant to
ratify generally didnt object to the powers the Constitution
delegated to the federal government. But they were suspicious:
they wanted assurance that if those few powers were granted,
other powers, never granted, wouldnt be seized too. In
The Federalist, Hamilton and Madison argued at
some length that under the proposed distribution of power the
federal government would never be able to usurp, as
they put it, those other powers. Madison wrote soothingly in
Federalist No. 45 that the powers of the federal government would
be few and defined, relating mostly to war and
foreign policy, while those remaining with the states would be
numerous and indefinite, and would have to do with
the everyday domestic life of the country. The word
usurpation occurs numberless times in the ratification
debates, reflecting the chief anxiety the champions of the
Constitution had to allay. And as a final assurance, the Tenth
Amendment stipulated that the powers not delegated
to the federal government were reserved to the
separate states and to the people.

But this wasnt enough to
satisfy everyone. Well-grounded fears persisted. And during the
first half of the nineteenth century, nearly every president, in his
inaugural message, felt it appropriate to renew the promise that
the powers of the federal government would not be exceeded, nor
the reserved powers of the states transgressed. The federal
government was to remain truly federal, with only a few specified
powers, rather than consolidated, with unlimited
powers.

The Civil War, or the War Between
the States if you like, resulted from the suspicion that the North
meant to use the power of the Union to destroy the sovereignty of
the Southern states. Whether or not that suspicion was justified,
the war itself produced that very result. The South was subjugated
and occupied like a conquered country. Its institutions were
profoundly remade by the federal government; the United States of
America was taking on the character of an extensive, and highly
centralized, empire. Similar processes were under way in Europe,
as small states were consolidated into large ones, setting the
stage for the tyrannies and gigantic wars of the twentieth
century.

Even so, the three constitutional
amendment ratified after the war contain a significant clause:
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by
appropriate legislation. Why is this significant? Because it
shows that even the conquerors still understood that a new power
of Congress required a constitutional amendment. It couldnt
just be taken by majority vote, as it would be today. If the
Congress then had wanted a national health plan, it would have
begun by asking the people for an amendment to the Constitution
authorizing it to legislate in the area of health care. The
immediate purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to provide a
constitutional basis for a proposed civil rights act.

But the Supreme Court soon found
other uses for the Fourteenth Amendment. It began striking down
state laws as unconstitutional. This was an important new twist in
American constitutional law. Hamilton, in arguing for judicial
review in Federalist No. 78, had envisioned the Court as a check on
Congress, resisting the illicit consolidation or centralization of
power. And our civics books still describe the function of checks
and balances in terms of the three branches of the federal
government mutually controlling each other. But in fact, the Court
was now countermanding the state legislatures, where the
principle of checks and balances had no meaning, since those state
legislatures had no reciprocal control on the Court. This
development eventually set the stage for the convulsive Supreme
Court rulings of the late twentieth century, from Brown v.
Board of Education to Roe v. Wade.

The big thing to recognize here is
that the Court had become the very opposite of the institution
Hamilton and others had had in mind. Instead of blocking the
centralization of power in the federal government, the Court was
assisting it.

The original point of the federal
system was that the federal government would have very little to
say about the internal affairs of the states. But the result of the
Civil War was that the federal government had a great deal to say
about those affairs  in Northern as well as Southern
states.

Note that this trend toward
centralization was occurring largely under Republican presidents.
The Democrat Grover Cleveland was one of the last great
spokesmen for federalism. He once vetoed a modest $10,000
federal grant for drought relief on grounds that there was no
constitutional power to do it. If that sounds archaic, remember
that the federal principle remained strong long enough that during
the 1950s, the federal highway program had to be called a
defense measure in order to win approval, and
federal loans to college students in the 1960s were absurdly called
defense loans for the same reason. The Tenth
Amendment is a refined taste, but it has always had a few
devotees.

But federalism suffered some
serious wounds during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. First
came the income tax, its constitutionality established by the
Sixteenth Amendment; this meant that every U.S. citizen was now,
for the first time, directly accountable to the federal government.
Then the Seventeenth Amendment required that senators be elected
by popular vote rather than chosen by state legislators; this meant
that the states no longer had their own representation in Congress,
so that they now lost their remaining control over the federal
government. The Eighteenth Amendment, establishing Prohibition,
gave the federal government even greater powers over the
countrys internal affairs. All these amendments were
ominous signs that federalism was losing its traditional place in
the hearts, and perhaps the minds, of Americans.

But again, notice that these
expansions of federal power were at least achieved by amending
the Constitution, as the Constitution itself requires. The
Constitution doesnt claim to be a living
document. It is written on paper, not rubber.

In fact the radicals of the early
twentieth century despaired of achieving socialism or communism
as long as the Constitution remained. They regarded it as the
critical obstacle to their plans, and thought a revolution would be
necessary to remove it. As The New
Republic wrote: To have a socialist society we
must have a new Constitution. Thats laying it on the
line!

Unfortunately, the next generation
of collectivists would be less candid in their contempt for the
federal system. Once they learned to feign devotion to the
Constitution they secretly regarded as obsolete, the laborious
formality of amendment would no longer be necessary. They could
merely pretend that the Constitution was on their side. After
Franklin Roosevelt restaffed the Supreme Court with his compliant
cronies, the federal government would be free to make up its own
powers as it went along, thanks to the notion that the Constitution
was a malleable living document, whose central
meaning could be changed, and even reversed, by ingenious
interpretation.

Roosevelts New Deal
brought fascist-style central planning to America  what
some call the mixed economy but Hilaire Belloc
called the Servile State  and his
highhanded approach to governance soon led to conflict with the
Court, which found several of his chief measures unconstitutional.
Early in his second term, as you know, Roosevelt retaliated by
trying to pack the Court by increasing the number of
seats. This power play alienated even many of his allies, but it
turned out not to be necessary. After 1937 the Court began seeing
things Roosevelts way. It voted as he wished; several
members obligingly retired; and soon he had appointed a majority
of the justices. The country virtually got a new Constitution.

Roosevelts Court soon
decided that the Tenth Amendment was a truism, of
no real force. This meant that almost any federal act was ipso
facto constitutional, and the powers reserved to the
states and the people were just leftovers the federal government
didnt want, like the meal left for the jackals by the
satisfied lion. There was almost no limit, now, on what the federal
government could do. In effect, the powers of the federal
government no longer had to come from the people by
constitutional delegation: they could be created by simple political
power.

Roosevelt also set the baneful
precedent of using entitlement programs, such as Social Security,
to buy some peoples votes with other peoples money.
It was both a fatal corruption of democracy and the realization of
the Servile State in America. The class of voting parasites has
been swelling ever since.

So the New Deal didnt just
expand the power of the federal government; that had been done
before. The New Deal did much deeper mischief: it struck at the
whole principle of constitutional resistance to federal expansion.
Congress didnt need any constitutional amendment to
increase its powers; it could increase its own powers ad hoc, at
any time, by simple majority vote.

All this, of course, would have
seemed monstrous to our ancestors. Even Alexander Hamilton, who
favored a relatively strong central government in his time, never
dreamed of a government so powerful.

The Court suffered a bloody
defeat at Roosevelts hands, and since his time it has never
found a major act of Congress unconstitutional. This has allowed
the power of the federal government to grow without restraint. At
the federal level, checks and balances has ceased to
include judicial review.

This is a startling fact, flying as
it does in the face of the familiar conservative complaints about
the Courts activism. When it comes to
Congress, the Court has been absolutely passive. As if to
compensate for its habit of capitulation to Congress, the
Courts postWorld War II activism has
been directed entirely against the states, whose laws it has struck
down in areas that used to be considered their settled and
exclusive provinces. Time after time, it has found
unconstitutional laws whose legitimacy had stood
unquestioned throughout the history of the Republic.

Notice how total the reversal of
the Courts role has been. It began with the duty, according
to Hamilton, of striking down new seizures of power by Congress.
Now it finds constitutional virtually everything Congress chooses
to do. The federal government has assumed myriads of new powers
nowhere mentioned or implied in the Constitution, yet the Court
has never seriously impeded this expansion, or rather explosion, of
novel claims of power. What it finds unconstitutional are the
traditional powers of the states.

The postwar Court has done
pioneering work in one notable area: the separation of church and
state. I said pioneering, not praiseworthy. The Court
has consistently imposed an understanding of the First Amendment
that is not only exaggerated but unprecedented  most
notoriously in its 1962 ruling that prayer in public schools
amounts to an establishment of religion. This
interpretation of the Establishment Clause has always been to the
disadvantage of Christianity and of any law with roots in Christian
morality. And its impossible to doubt that the justices who
voted for this interpretation were voting their predilections.

Maybe thats the point.
Ive never heard it put quite this way, but the Courts
boldest rulings showed something less innocent than a series of
honest mistakes. Studying these cases and others of the
Courts liberal heyday, one never gets the sense that the
majority was suppressing its own preferences; it was clearly
enacting them. Those rulings can be described as wishful thinking
run amok, and touched with more than a little arrogance. All in all,
the Court displayed the opposite of the restrained and impartial
temperament one expects even of a traffic-court judge, let alone a
Supreme Court.

Its ironic to recall
Hamiltons assurance that the Supreme Court would be
the least dangerous of the three branches of the
federal government. But Hamilton did give us a shrewd warning
about what would happen if the Court were ever corrupted: in
Federalist No. 78 he wrote that liberty can have nothing to
fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear
from its union with either of the other [branches]. Since
Franklin Roosevelt, as Ive said, the judiciary has in effect
formed a union with the other two branches to aggrandize the
power of the federal government at the expense of the states and
the people.

This, in outline, is the
constitutional history of the United States. You wont find it
in the textbooks, which are required to be optimistic, to present
degeneration as development, and to treat the successive
pronouncements of the Supreme Court as so many oracular
revelations of constitutional meaning. A leading liberal scholar,
Leonard Levy, has gone so far as to say that what matters is not
what the Constitution says, but what the Court has said about the
Constitution in more than 400 volumes of commentary.

This can only mean that the
commentary has displaced the original text, and that We the
People have been supplanted by We the
Lawyers. We the People cant read and understand our
own Constitution. We have to have it explained to us by the
professionals. Moreover, if the Court enjoys oracular status, it
cant really be criticized, because it can do no wrong. We
may dislike its results, but future rulings will have to be derived
from them as precedents, rather than from the text and logic of the
Constitution. And notice that the conservative
justices appointed by Republican presidents have by and large
upheld not the original Constitution, but the most liberal
interpretations of the Court itself  notably on the subject
of abortion, which Ill return to in a minute.

To sum up this little
constitutional history. The history of the Constitution is the story
of its inversion. The original understanding of the Constitution has
been reversed. The Constitution creates a presumption against any
power not plainly delegated to the federal government and a
corresponding presumption in favor of the rights and powers of the
states and the people. But we now have a sloppy presumption in
favor of federal power. Most people assume the federal government
can do anything it isnt plainly forbidden to do.

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments
were adopted to make the principle of the Constitution as clear as
possible. Hamilton, you know, argued against adding a Bill of
Rights, on grounds that it would be redundant and confusing. He
thought it would seem to imply that the federal government had
more powers than it had been given. Why say, he asked, that the
freedom of the press shall not be infringed, when the federal
government would have no power by which it could be infringed?
And you can even make the case that he was exactly right. He
understood, at any rate, that our freedom is safer if we think of
the Constitution as a list of powers rather than as a list of
rights.

Be that as it may, the Bill of
Rights was adopted, but it was designed to meet his objection. The
Ninth Amendment says: The enumeration in the Constitution
of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others
retained by the people. The Tenth says: The powers
not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States
respectively, or to the people.

Now what these two provisions
mean is pretty simple. The Ninth means that the list of the
peoples rights in the Constitution is not meant to be
complete  that they still have many other rights, like the
right to travel or to marry, which may deserve just as much
respect as the right not to have soldiers quartered in ones
home in peacetime. The Tenth, on the other hand, means that the
list of powers delegated to the federal government
is complete  and that any other powers the government
assumed would be, in the Framers habitual word,
usurped.

As I said earlier, the Founders
believed that our rights come from God, and the
governments powers come from us. So the Constitution
cant list all our rights, but it can and does list all the
federal governments powers.

You can think of the Constitution
as a sort of antitrust act for government, with the Ninth and Tenth
Amendments at its core. Its remarkable that the same
liberals who think business monopolies are sinister think
monopolies of political power are progressive. When they
cant pass their programs because of the constitutional
safeguards, they complain about gridlock  a
cliché that shows they miss the whole point of the
enumeration and separation of powers.

Well, I dont have to tell
you that this way of thinking is absolutely alien to that of
todays politicians and pundits. Can you imagine Al Gore, Dan
Rostenkowski, or Tom Brokaw having a conversation about political
principles with any of the Founding Fathers? If you can, you must
have a vivid fantasy life.

And the result of the loss of our
original political idiom has been, as I say, to invert the original
presumptions. The average American, whether he has had
high-school civics or a degree in political science, is apt to
assume that the Constitution somehow empowers the government
to do nearly anything, while implicitly limiting our rights by
listing them. Not that anyone would say it this way. But its
as if the Bill of Rights had said that the enumeration of the federal
governments powers in the Constitution is not meant to
deny or disparage any other powers it may choose to claim, while
the rights not given to the people in the Constitution are reserved
to the federal government to give or withhold, and the states may
be progressively stripped of their original powers.

What it comes to is that we
dont really have an operative Constitution anymore. The
federal government defines its own powers day by day. Its
limited not by the list of its powers in the Constitution, but by
whatever it can get away with politically. Just as the president
can now send troops abroad to fight without a declaration of war,
Congress can pass a national health care program without a
constitutional delegation of power. The only restraint left is
political opposition.

If you suspect Im
overstating the change from our original principles, I give you the
late Justice Hugo Black. In a 1965 case called Griswold v.
Connecticut, the Court struck down a law forbidding
the sale of contraceptives on grounds that it violated a right of
privacy. (This supposed right, of course, became the
basis for the Courts even more radical 1973 ruling in
Roe v. Wade, but thats another story.)
Justice Black dissented in the Griswold case on
the following ground: I like my privacy as well as the next
[man], he wrote, but I am nevertheless compelled to
admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by
some specific constitutional provision. What a hopelessly
muddled  and really sinister  misconception of the
relation between the individual and the state: government has a
right to invade our privacy, unless prohibited by the Constitution.
You dont have to share the Courts twisted view of
the right of privacy in order to be shocked that one of its members
takes this view of the right of government to invade
privacy.

It gets crazier. In 1993 the Court
handed down one of the most bizarre decisions of all time. For two
decades, enemies of legal abortion had been supporting Republican
candidates in the hope of filling the Court with appointees who
would review Roe v. Wade. In Planned
Parenthood v. Casey, the Court finally did so. But even
with eight Republican appointees on the Court, the result was not
what the conservatives had hoped for. The Court reaffirmed
Roe.

Its reasoning was amazing. A
plurality opinion  a majority of the five-justice majority in
the case  admitted that the Courts previous ruling in
Roe might be logically and historically
vulnerable. But it held that the paramount consideration was that
the Court be consistent, and not appear to be yielding to public
pressure, lest it lose the respect of the public. Therefore the Court
allowed Roe to stand.

Among many things that might be
said about this ruling, the most basic is this: The Court in effect
declared itself a third party to the controversy, and then, setting
aside the merits of the two principals claims, ruled in its
own interest! It was as if the referee in a prizefight had declared
himself the winner. Cynics had always suspected that the Court did
not forget its self-interest in its decisions, but they never
expected to hear it say so.

The three justices who signed
that opinion evidently didnt realize what they were saying.
A distinguished veteran Court-watcher (who approved of
Roe, by the way) told me he had never seen
anything like it. The Court was actually telling us that it put its
own welfare ahead of the merits of the arguments before it. In its
confusion, it was blurting out the truth.

But by then very few Americans
could even remember the original constitutional plan. The original
plan was as Madison and Tocqueville described it: State government
was to be the rule, federal government the exception. The
states powers were to be numerous and
indefinite, federal powers few and defined.
This is a matter not only of history, but of iron logic: the
Constitution doesnt make sense when read any other way.
As Madison asked, why bother listing particular federal powers
unless unlisted powers are withheld?

The unchecked federal government
has not only overflowed its banks; it has even created its own
economy. Thanks to its exercise of myriad unwarranted powers, it
can claim tens of millions of dependents, at least part of whose
income is due to the abuse of the taxing and spending powers for
their benefit: government employees, retirees, farmers,
contractors, teachers, artists, even soldiers. Large numbers of
these people are paid much more than their market value because
the taxpayer is forced to subsidize them. By the same token, most
taxpayers would instantly be better off if the federal government
simply ceased to exist  or if it suddenly returned to its
constitutional functions.

Can we restore the Constitution
and recover our freedom? I have no doubt that we can. Like all
great reforms, it will take an intelligent, determined effort by
many people. I dont want to sow false optimism.

But the time is ripe for a
constitutional counterrevolution. Discontent with the ruling
system, as the 1992 Perot vote showed, is deep and widespread
among several classes of people: Christians, conservatives, gun
owners, taxpayers, and simple believers in honest government all
have their reasons. The rulers lack legitimacy and dont
believe in their own power strongly enough to defend it.

The beauty of it is that the people
dont have to invent a new system of government in order to
get rid of this one. They only have to restore the one described in
the Constitution  the system our government already
professes to be upholding. Taken seriously, the Constitution would
pose a serious threat to our form of government.

And for just that reason, the
ruling parties will be finished as soon as the American people
rediscover and awaken their dormant Constitution.

FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and
others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald
Griffin Foundation. Click
here for more information.